College Not Apart from ‘Real World’ :: Education Learning Essays

College Not Apart from Real World Welcome to the accepted world. It is the phrase that most people quotation when greeting college graduates, aside from you have been preapproved for a credit card, and it is quickly becoming redundant and, quite frankly, annoying. No doubt, it often is said with love and affection, easing shoot of the lips disgruntled office workers, perhaps wishing they could escape back to those safe college years when Ma and Pa were sending checks in the mail and their only worries were how they were passing game to get the keg into their buddies hallway. To those poor souls, college represents the days when the world was reduced to barbecue, bad beer and homecoming football games. Well, college isnt how they remember it. Things arent the way they used to be. My new-fangled alma mater is an institution nestled in the foothills of Montana, with an enrollment of fewer than 1,000. We had our share of barbecue, bad beer, and football games. But, unless my memor y already has been glossed over by nostalgia, we had plenty of the real world as well. One of my classmates was killed in a drunken driving accident and was listed in my commencement program as a posthumous graduate. The dormitory halls were filled with tales, both speculated and official, of sexual and physical assault. A young man visiting our campus during an athletic-related weekend was assaulted, urinated upon and threatened. He later refused to file charges because he was embarrassed to go public. There were many students, both male and female, who were seriously contemplating suicide, and there was at least one accidental overdose that later was classified as an move suicide. Also rampant were cases of drug and alcohol abuse, students with eating disorders, and students facing chronic depression. And there were students struggling with the everyday pressures that plague us all bills that were overdue, friendly auditory sensation calls from collectors and part-time jobs that paid the minimum wage. My first year on campus, I lived across the hall from a 47 year old man who had unconnected his job after 25 years of hard work. Sent back to school because his services werent needed anymore, he found himself far from his family and his dreams of advance(prenominal) retirement. There were students suffering from learning disorders, students who were married, students with children, students who were single mothers the list is endless.